I took this picture at the end of a very long day of walking – and it is completely untouched. No filters, no improvements – just nature doing what it does best.

August is my month for self-indulgence. The time that I take for myself to do one of the things that I have grown to love the most.
So far this month I have enjoyed time walking with lovely people in the Peak District, the Lake District, across the South Downs, on Brownsea Island, around the Devil’s Punch Bowl and down some of the LipChis way.

I have plans to walk some of Offa’s Dyke in a couple of weeks – and that leaves me with some empty space on my calendar next week!

As promised, some of the beautiful purpleness we found up on the Peaks surrounding the Edale Vale in the Peak District.

As we were passing this slope full of beautiful heather a passing Scotsman commented that I was dressed to match the heather… I was actually going for the giant blueberry look, dressed as I was from head to toe in purple, but I still took his comment as a compliment.

These spiky balls of delightful purple caught my eye and I couldn’t resist taking a quick snap with my phone.

And similarly this little beauty.

And that’s one of the things you have to love about life. Wherever you look you can find beauty. If you choose to see it. Weeds to some are beautiful flowers to others.

A soggy climb up Jacobs Ladder to the top of a windswept peak could be considered a form of torture to some – for my very good friend and I this week, it was an adventure. And we loved it!

Even if he did step thigh deep into a bog. I assumed he did that to make me laugh and he succeeded.

And getting lost was just an opportunity to walk another ridge – where we discovered the most amazing natural rock sculptures that we would have missed if we hadn’t taken a wrong turn.

Off to the Lake District tomorrow. I wonder what purple I’ll find there!

Way back on Day 189 – Metamorphosis, I shared my worries about the caterpillar. Does it know it will become a butterfly..?

Some practical, functional, straight down the line, don’t waste your time types told me that no, a caterpillar is an eating machine without thought or dream. It does what it does because it is programmed to do it.

The dreamers, the hopers, the wishful thinkers, the lost believers and dare to dreamers told me that yes, they too hoped that the caterpillar knew. That he worked and he waited and he went about his business safe in the knowledge that better days were yet to come.

But what of the butterfly?

From its former life as a working, functional eating machine so it becomes a light, delicate, fluttering, flying vision of beauty and grace. Flitting from flower to flower in sunbeams and freedom.

But the butterflies eyes are right at the front and its beautiful wings spread out behind for all the world to see. But not she. Or he. So does a butterfly know it is now so beautiful? Or does a butterfly live, like so many of the beautiful girls and ladies I know, unaware of the awe, and the admiring glances and the slightest touch of envy that others might feel when they have the pleasure of seeing them. Of being with them.

I have my own beautiful butterflies. They are truly beautiful, of spirit as well as skin. They are delightful and bring joy, and happiness and they brighten a room just by being in it. But they live like they are caterpillars. Waiting for the day when the this or that, that they believe to be so wrong will morph into their unrealistic and reasonable ideal of what beauty looks like.

So my question now is, does the butterfly know she has transformed? Can she share in the beauty she gives so much of without ever knowing?